I’ve lost track of time; it is meaningless to count the hours in the grave. The seasons sweep over the cemetery like spindrift over ocean waves. The sun bakes the brittle, skeletal grass each summer in turn. Leaves drop in autumn and vanish into the soil, food for the always hungry worm. Snow hides the gravesite each winter with great precision. No one has dropped flowers here since I was laid to what should have been rest.

I remain here, a spirit caught in mid-stride, stuck to the bones that once carried me around the world. My foot is caught in the latticework of the medullar cavity where the marrow used to be. Sometimes I nearly get loose. Sometimes it seems like I can free myself from this jam. I need to join the light that so enticingly beckoned when my body quit working.

I’m not claustrophobic and I’m not really impatient. I can wait. But sometimes I think that someone just forgot me when the time came to collect the more durable part of the human being that I was. The flesh was soon gone but the brittle bones held on tightly.  They must sense that when I’m gone, there will be nothing left for them but the cold black earth. Flesh and bones aren’t required for a spirit set free.

Except that I’m not free. Not yet, anyway. My foot is still trapped in the bones of my host. So I’m not as insubstantial as I appear. And I’m not the only one. On many nights there are other lights that flicker. You sometimes call them will-o’-the-wisps or friar’s lanterns, or by our fancy name, ignes fatui. But we’re not just an illusion or delusion; we are struggling souls stuck in a solid world.